Yo ho ho and a tanker of oil – piracy’s modern cry

Wednesday 19 November 2008 08:56 BST

With a vast oil tanker hijacked off the coast of Somalia, piracy is back in the headlines. But while these modern pirates are a long way from the days of cutlasses and the Jolly Roger, piracy has long been an African problem - and one that the Royal Navy has been fighting for centuries.

Although pirates have been around since men first sailed the seas, Somali piracy is of a relatively modern vintage. Many Somali pirates are former fishermen and militiamen, falling back on crime after a 30-year civil war destroyed their native land. But they still have a long way to go to match the most bloodthirsty African pirates of all - the Barbary corsairs.

Based at Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and other North African ports, the corsairs were a threat to Mediterranean shipping for almost six centuries. With the backing of their Ottoman overlords, they not only plundered Christian fleets but mounted major raids against Spanish and Italian cities, seizing their people and selling them into slavery.

At their peak in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Barbary corsairs were extraordinarily daring and powerful figures. The most notorious, Hayreddin Pasha, known as Barbarossa, raided as far north as Marseilles, Nice and Toulon, and was awarded the title of Ottoman admiral. His rival, Dragut, sacked the Corsican city of Bastia and carried off the entire population of the Maltese island of Gozo, some 6,000 people, as slaves.

Their victims were not confined to the people of the Mediterranean. In the early 1700s, Algerian prisons held more than 20,000 captives, many of them English traders and travellers. And in 1631 the pirate Murat Reis landed in the little Irish town of Baltimore, County Cork, and carried off the entire population, who ended their lives as galley slaves or servants in the Algerian Sultan's harem.

As late as the 18th century, the Royal Navy turned a blind eye to Barbary piracy, reckoning that it was a useful weapon against Britain's French and Spanish trading rivals. But by the age of Napoleon, patience was wearing thin.

In the 1800s the new US Navy twice went to war against the corsairs in revenge for the capture of American ships. And in 1816, Britain's envoy Lord Exmouth gave Algiers a final warning - which the corsairs promptly ignored. In response, the Royal Navy bombarded the city, terrifying its people into giving up their captives.

African piracy died out during the Victorian era, when the continent was subject to European colonial rule. Its revival is a product of the instability of failed states like Somalia, scarred by civil war. With 92 attacks already this year, piracy is again a serious international menace.

And while nobody wants yet another war, the pirates must surely be taught a lesson.